PlayStation 4 Remote Play Comes To PC Today

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If you have a PlayStation 4, from today you can use the Remote Play feature to stream games from it to a PC. The promised support arrives with today’s system software update 3.50, and Sony have released a Remote Play application for Windows and Mac to match. It’s a bit of a niche feature, useful in far fewer situations than Remote Play on e.g. a Vita handheld, but I thought you might want to know, hypothetical PS4 owner.

Remote Play is a way to play games, y’know, remotely. It runs the game on the PS4 (so you do need to own one and the game), converts the game’s output into a video streamed blasted to you across the cybernet, and sends commands back to the game the same way. This introduces a bit of delay between the game and controls, because technology isn’t magic, but it’s playable enough for many games in the right situation.

So, uh, what’s it useful for? Maybe you fancy cranking on Bloodborne but someone’s watching TV in the lounge. Or maybe you’re staying away from home and have brought your laptop with you. Or you want to play on your laptop in the garden on a spring afternoon. Maybe it’s for your work computer, you little sneak. Maybe… other things I haven’t thought of because, look, I’ll ‘fess up: I mostly use Cara’s PS4 to watch Netflix.

It seems less useful than Remote Play on a handheld, but still something handy to have. Okay, cool, bye for now. Talk to you later on the Internet, okay, bye.

Ah, how I miss the days when I would put on a headset, pick a joystick and gurn at my CRT monitor from three inches away. Sadly I’ve now discovered playing video games, which takes up too much of my time.

I love the image on the computer too. It’s the 1 second load screen before requesting a level up and the character sheet appearing. Absolutely the lest likely time you would yell like that while playing bloodborne.

Reading the title before scrolling far enough to see the picture, this exact picture down to the smallest details like the colour of the kitchen wall, the barstool, the oval logo on the headset and the facial expression that can only belong to someone completely and fully immersed into the world of Yarnham flashed in my mind.

I think this is a cool idea, even if it won’t be used very often. At least the option is available. I have multiple consoles, including a PC configured for 3D, hooked up to my 3D TV. If the kids want to play on the PC or one of the other consoles but I want to play the PS4, I’ll fire it up on my main gaming PC now.

Yeah, it’s a really useful feature to at least have. In some cases, I find that I’m just more comfortable in front of my PC. My PS4 is in the same room, but I don’t play it because sitting in bed playing games isn’t comfortable for me.

Yeah, it probably won’t be used much, but I think it’s probably a low-overhead project for them. Since the PS4 operating system is based on FreeBSD, it’s basically just a VNC client, right? Just like Screen Sharing on a Mac. Of course, they’ve added some nice stuff to it so that you don’t have to input an IP address and you can get a lower-resolution image if you want to improve network latency and so forth.

Seems to work decently well after some minor setup hassle. My PS4 is on wifi since it’s too far from an ethernet port, but the connection so far is decent enough to play non-twitch games comfortably. Bloodborne is a no-go with the slight input delay.

Seems entirely pointless. Why would any PC gamer want to play 720p games with only 30fps on their high-end PCs? I suppose if you’re dying to play Bloodborne (as suggested in the article) it’s a tiny bit useful but this just seems like getting that gift you never asked for or cared that much about. “Oh, tube socks!”

I really don’t understand how people don’t grasp the simple concept that maybe, just maybe, they don’t always have access to the TV the console is hooked up to but they would like to play a game from that console.